beloved Irish poet, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, died Friday (Aug. 30) in Dublin, at the age of 74, after a brief illness.

Probably the best stories are coming from local novelist Nina de Gramont and her husband, the nature writer David Gessner. When Gessner was guest faculty at Harvard, the couple and their young daughter rented out Heaney’s apartment in Adams House on the Harvard campus.

Heaney’s wife, de Gramont noted, left Clinique samples all around the house. Heaney left things, too, mostly scribbled notes. Poems in manuscript? No, mostly shopping lists. Heaney, de Gramont noted, was apparently a TV news junkie — when you grow up in Northern Ireland, it must come with the territory — and he had the times and channels for every major news show taped to the back of his television remoate.

Gessner writes about living in a great man’s space in his essay “Trickster in the City” in his collection, “Sick of Nature.”

Heaney, according to his New York Times obituary, may have been the most-read living poet in English, on the planet, a tribute to his accessibility — with didn’t mean that his verse was exactly simple.

His stature in Ireland was monumental. Think: Which American poets would Vice President Biden eulogize in a public address? The First Deputy Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, though, felt obliged to announce he was “shocked and saddened” by the news, while the Irish prime minster compared Heaney to Yeats, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.

(Heaney had grown up in County Londonderry, in Northern Ireland, but moved south. In his poems, he deplored the Troubles but found something nice to say about both the Protestant and Catholic sides in the conflict and announced that he distrusted all political extremes.)

Meanwhile, the world’s most famous living Irishman, Liam Neeson, told the BBC that “Ireland, and Northern Ireland especially, has lost a part of its artistic soul.” (Not bad for a guy whose previous big line was “Release the Kraken!”)

Heaney first gained notice in 1966 with his poetry collection, “Death of a Naturalist.” Other notable collections included “North,” “Field World” and “Station Island.” He was also a distinguished translator. (I treasure my copy of his version of “Beowulf.”)

The son and grandson of farmers, Heaney paid tribute to his forebears and the land they tilled in one of his best-known poems, “Digging”:

“The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.”

Instead, Heaney resolved in the poem to “dig” with his pen.

An Irish patriot, Heaney objected in 1982 when he was included in an anthology of British poetry. His verse response:

About This Blog

This is an emporium for all things literary: occasional book reviews, local book news, items about authors (mostly from the Cape Fear area but occasional visitors) and miscellaneous rants.

The usual author is Ben Steelman, feature writer and book columnist for the Star-News. He’s that shaggy, slightly smelly character you spot lurking in the back aisles of your local bookstore. Physically, he has more than a passing resemblance to Ignatius J. Reilly, hero of John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces” — some observers have noted other parallels as well.